Published in 1986 and weighing in at more than 1,000 pages, It might be Stephen King's best book: It's the kind of unsettling story that digs under your skin, then wriggles through fat and muscle before lodging itself in bone. Alternately horrific and heartwarming, it's a decades-spanning history of Derry, Maine, where an ancient horror lurks under the streets... and where futile denial gnaws away at those lucky enoughâor unlucky enoughâto survive.
Kingâs singular ability to tap into this lizard-brain stuff made him a blockbuster author. Because heâs a blockbuster author, a lot of his books get turned into movies. Because his ability is singular, most of those movies are bad.
This It isnât bad! This It is... fine? Yes. This It is fine.
Itâs tempting to grade this It on a curve, because unlike most King adaptations, it gets a lot right. The young cast is phenomenal, particularly Sophia Lillis and Stranger Thingsâ Finn Wolfhard. Nearly every shot is eerily beautiful to look at. Itâs also consistently funny and consistently weird, two things that rarely make the cut in King movies.
But âcutâ is the key word: After chopping Itâs massive story in half (youâll have to wait for the sequel for the rest), this streamlined It lacks the unshakeable dread and anxiety that should form its twisted backbone. Instead, Mama director Andy Muschietti delivers whatâs basically a haunted-house movie. Sure, existential terror is tough to do in two hours, but here, even the jump scares underwhelmâmaybe because this time, creepy clown Pennywise (Bill SkarsgĂ„rd) is more childlike than threatening, with the script only rarely balancing out his playful menace with actual danger. Meanwhile, Derryâwhich, for all intents and purposes, is one of Itâs major charactersâfeels more like Anytown, USA than a time-worn, cold-hearted place where fear and loss suffuse each home, each block, each day.
In theory, this It should work: Many of the things that make Kingâs book so memorable and affecting are here, and all those elementsâespecially the unforgettable charactersâare handled better than in the 1990 miniseries. But for a movie with so much blood, It feels disappointingly bloodless. Maybe the sequel will find the scope and the horror missing from this chapter, but for now, It feels less than the sum of its parts.